Saturday, August 4, 2018

Failure of governments reaches far beyond trump....and the public interest is threatened

Reports from Great
Britain this week indicate that Brits check their cell phones once every twelve
minutes, and that on average, they spend some twenty-four hours on social media
each week.

For some those figures
may be little more than another obvious and boring piece of data. For others,
like this scribe, they are nothing short of astounding, when we put them up
against the notion, also in the report that, although we are more digitally connected,
we are also more lonely than we ever were. Can anyone really be surprised by
these cultural smoke signals?

There is a profound
difference between actually speaking face-to-face with another and texting
them, or “visiting” on Facebook or twitter. And reports indicate that many are
coming to this realization and are opting out of both digital platforms.
Designed as a for-profit business, how could anyone, including especially their
designers, not recognize that from the get-go, they would both be manipulative.
Generating an audience on behalf of advertisers, the source of their revenue,
they are like mini-billboards, on which anyone and everyone can put their mark.
Even that anachronism, the telephone had (and still has) the advantage of at
least being able to listen to the voice on the other end. Sighs, pauses, pitch
and volume of the voice, (and the obvious downside of listening when the other
person sloops soup in you ear!)

Elevating gossip to the
social “status” that it is now embedded in the sands of time, for any and all
to witness, to supplement, to excoriate and to deride but never to delete is,
perhaps, a triumph of the marriage of technology and for-profit capitalism. It
is certainly not a supplement or a complement to the social, mental,
intellectual or physical health and well-being of their users. There was
literally no “orientation” from the producers; there was no training in how the
technology might be helpful, without being detrimental. There were no “clinical
trials” as there could and should have been.

And there still has
been little if any leadership from governments to offset the negative impact of
this massive, even revolutionary, incursion into the fabric of the culture of
the world. Because “business” comes up
with some new “thing” does not mean that the governments do not have to make
both preparations for and cautions against those things. Drones, for example,
are another of the “things” that business (and the military) have “fired” into
the global economy, without adequate gate-keeping on their initial entry,
parameters on their use, and sanctions for endangerment of the public including
passing private and commercial airplanes.

The “marketplace”
presents dangers and threats different from and perhaps even more dangerous than
“weed” but because we have a history of “prohibitions” on alcohol and a history
of ginormous health bills resulting from smoking cigarettes, governance is more
“ready” (not necessarily able) to take precautionary steps prior to the launch
of the public sale of marijuana. Not only our history, but also the prospect of
truck loads of tax cash available to governments pave the path for governments
to intervene, to educate, to prepare and to “study”….especially from the perspective
of potential revenue.

Government arguments
that rationalize the “sitting on the sidelines” approach to whatever the private
sector puts into the market likely include the “right” of commercial ventures
to function without undue government oversight, regulation and barriers. So far
has the political culture moved in favour of corporate for-profit freedom that
the playing field has become a literal and metaphoric “wild west”….virtually
lawless!

And the public
interest, naturally, is flipped off as “mere bureaucratic anality”. At the same
time that the private sector has been elevated to the status of a cultural
idol, the public sector has been relegated to a nuisance, a vacuum of public
funds, an impediment to social and economic “progress”.

In America, even the
specifications for “building” a 3-D printer version of a handgun or rifle are
considered nothing more than “free speech,” that catch-all phrase that gives
license to behaviour (even public speech) that ranks as hate, character
assassination and another tipping of the scales in the direction of anarchy.

(Critics, do not try to
push back by insinuating that permitting digital technology to enter the
marketplace leads to anarchy. That is not what is being said here.) What is
being asserted is that the demise of the importance of the “public interest” in
general has many perhaps unforeseen and potentially dangerous and threatening
implications. What is also being said is that government has to become much
more foresighted, developing its own “intelligence” not only for the purposes
of ‘national security’ in the traditional sense of reconnaissance on potential
military enemies, but also in a very news sense that the patents applied for by
private corporate enterprises may have (and undoubtedly do have) serious and
not always positive implications on public health and well being.

Even philanthropy, that
mantra to which corporate marketing gurus now cling, in an insatiable obsession
to garner and glue themselves to public support (specific to their market
demographic), has been commandeered by the corporate sector, without regard to
whether or not they are actually making significant contributions to “worthy causes”.
For example, promising to contribute a single penny for every purchase made by
card holders to the cause of “breast cancer research” is obviously merely a
veneer of integrity and authenticity and reeks of self-serving narcissism by the
then offending American Express, before they were exposed for their chicanery.
The documentary Pink Ribbons Inc. exposes the corporate deception including
Avon, for their duplicitous championing of their “walks” for research into breast
cancer research while including carcinogens in the products they offer for
sale. From both the perspective of putting a friendly cozy “pink” colour on an
ugly, debilitating and deadly disease, and from the perspective of misleading
their sincere “walkers” “runners” “bikers” and all other “doers” for the cause,
corporates need to come under increased oversight by government.

Also, the accounting of
the millions of dollars, including whether or not research projects are duplicating
others, repeating the failures already known, and networking the requisite
information for the establishment of a public confidence in the whole process of
public activism for this (and other) causes seems to be a reasonable expectation
of governments.

Digital technology,
corporate malfeasance, corporate threats to public health in such areas as the
inclusion of “plastic” beads in products used by households on a daily basis,
military intelligence that is gobbled up by the private sector without government
oversight….these are just some of the gaps in public information and public
security that impact health budgets, workplace costs and social and cultural ethos.

When (not if any longer)
the pursuit of profit trumps the protection of the public interest, in all of
the many aspects, features and facets of that phrase, and the public plays the “dumb”
role of the innocent participant, without the needed protections of the
government, relying on, and thereby defaulting to the corporate culture to take
their responsibilities seriously, the public is endangered. And that
endangerment is so imperceptible and so “innocuous” and so “out-of-sight-and-out-of-mind”
then danger lurks right under our noses.

And the impunity of the
governments, including their clear path to re-election without so much as a
public discussion of the dangers and the responsibility of those perpetrating
those dangers being uncovered, continues.

It is not only that
trump is overturning the traditional roles and institutions of government that
is unsettling. The very culture that permits and enables him and the private
sector effectively to subvert the public responsibility of governments is much
larger and less visible and therefore even more dangerous than the person of
trump himself. His erratic and dissembling tweets, while disturbing and
indicative of a turbulence of mind, are merely a mirage of verbal fog, giving “cover”
to behaviour by his government and by failures of omission by all governments
at the expense of public interest and well being, for which all elected
officials have taken oaths to protect.

Make not mistake: this
is a war of attitudes, values and complete power take-over. And just as on the
literal battlefield, the first casuality is truth, so too, the truth that
protects ordinary people from the assaults perpetrated by the private sector
are to be surveyed just as vigorously as those perpetrated by foreign enemies.

In fact, a former FBI
representative, recently appearing on MSNBC, says he is less worried about the
threats to democracy posed by Russian invasion of American social media than he
is about the home-grown, much more sophisticated, and more narrowly targeted social
media invasion by Qoron, and such agents who are now on public display at trump
rallies.

Has the ‘deep state’
become more dangerous than any of us could imagine before we even knew of its
existence?